In a datacenter, there is a large amount of computer equipment of various types including servers, storage devices among many others. Oftentimes this equipment is arranged in a rack. To provide for sufficient cooling for each of the devices, particularly for servers, an individual fan is associated with each server. For example, a central processing unit (CPU) of the server is typically coupled to its own fan to provide for cooling.
While many rack-based enclosures are of a closed design in which the equipment is enclosed within an enclosed enclosure, it is anticipated that future datacenter designs may be of an open frame design such as the open frame described in the Open Compute Project Server Chassis and Triplet Hardware (v. 1.0) specification. As cooling of datacenter equipment consumes electricity and other resources including space considerations, a need exists for improved cooling mechanisms.